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Lachlan Cunningham

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — For all the foot-burners on the field at Levi’s Stadium in Sunday’s NFC divisional-round playoff game between the San Francisco 49ers and Dallas Cowboys, it was becoming a battle of attrition, turnovers, field position, old-school defense and — swallow hard — kickers. Both teams had weapons, but both had stoppers, and you wondered whether this was going to be decided by inches or by somebody’s foot. Instead, George Kittle made something so big happen, a catch so eye-widening and lore-worthy, that it rescued this stingy small-yardage game and helped vault the 49ers to the NFC championship game by the suggestively grudging score of 19-12.

“I was trying to be dramatic,” Kittle said afterward, laughing.

Deebo Samuel? He got nothing — ran for 11 yards, which made Ezekiel Elliott’s 26 for the Cowboys look like giant steps. “It was some tough runs, some tough yardage out there,” said the 49ers’ Christian McCaffrey, who qualified as a big scorer with his two-yard touchdown in the fourth quarter set up by “The Bobble.”

That’s what the 49ers were calling Kittle’s play in the locker room. In January 1982, it was Dwight Clark who grabbed “The Catch” from Joe Montana, the leaping fingertip-snare that beat the Cowboys to clinch a Super Bowl trip and define a triumphalist era for this team. “The Bobble” was somewhat less definitive — the 49ers still must get past the top-seeded Philadelphia Eagles if they want to play for the Lombardi Trophy. But it will be part of a timeless reel nevertheless, watched over and over again.

It started with a naked bootleg by rookie quarterback Brock Purdy, who whirled to his left and found none of his options available. Samuel was covered, and so was his second read, Brandon Aiyuk. “I’m not even in the read,” Kittle remarked. But he felt space open up in front of him, so he turned and sprinted upfield and started waving his arm, capped by a white glove, trying to get Purdy’s attention.

“He saw the white hand flying up and gave me a shot at the ball,” Kittle said.

Until that moment, it had been a strangely stalemated game. It began with huge offensive expectations in perfectly cloudless cool football weather, with a brisk north wind that stiffened the red-and-gold tailgater flags in the parking lots until they looked like fields full of medieval battle legions. It was a record-tying ninth playoff meeting between the rivals, and there were scorchers all over the field, a surfeit of dashing skill players. The 49ers came into the contest all octane and surprise, led by dimpling, beardless, 23-year-old quarterback Purdy, the unlooked-for young star who replaced his more expensive and fragile elders (in terms of pro experience), the injured <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/18/trey-lance-injury-49ers-jimmy-garoppolo/" target=_blank>Trey Lance</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/12/04/jimmy-garoppolo-49ers-brock-purdy/" target=_blank>Jimmy Garoppolo</a>. “You don’t see a young player making panicked decisions,” Cowboys Coach Mike McCarthy remarked of Purdy in the previous week. Thanks partly to his combination of sound decisions and ripping throws, the 49ers hadn’t scored fewer than 37 points in the previous four games.

But panic was exactly what the Cowboys intended to inflict on Purdy with monstrous pass rushers Micah Parsons and DeMarcus Lawrence. The Cowboys sacked Purdy on the second play of the game, and the question became this: What would the kid do then? Could the Cowboys confuse or rattle him into the game-killing mistakes and bad throws that he had so far avoided? Parsons was almost condescending on the subject in the days leading up to the game — he did everything but call Purdy a cute kid.

“I’m a fan of Purdy,” he said with a suspiciously excessive generosity. “I think he came in and did everything the right way. He prepared like he was going to be a starter, and when his time came, he’s shining a great light. . . . I definitely wouldn’t underestimate him. He might have surprised some people early on, and probably they thought no rookie was going to come in and beat us, but he’s taken them this far, so I’m super excited to go against him. Let’s see what he’s got.”

What Purdy had was all kinds of composure — and the sense not to try to do too much, just his part. “Brock wasn’t distraught. There was no jitteriness,” Kittle said later. Purdy would complete 19 of 29 throws for 214 yards with no turnovers. He let the 49ers’ staunch defense and wearing running game grind the Cowboys down over three hours and bided his time, looking for the right opportunity for a big strike.

“You could just feel guys sticking with it and not panicking,” McCaffrey said. Eventually, as he aptly described it, “the two-yard runs turned into four- and eight-yard runs.” Still, nobody could gain more than Elijah Mitchell’s 51 yards on 14 carries, and the 49ers needed something to break the thing open.

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If Purdy’s composure was the big pressure point for the 49ers, the question for the Cowboys was just how long they could stand up to the sheer physicality and overwhelming multiplicity of the 49ers on both sides of the ball. Here was a fascinating statistic: Teams that played the 49ers this season were 0-15 the following week — that’s how badly they beat opponents up. And instead of Purdy, it was the Cowboys’ Dak Prescott who was pressured into big mistakes: two interceptions that led to a pair of Robbie Gould’s four field goals.

Sometimes watching this exquisitely crafted yet deep and muscled 49ers team is like trying to follow a magic trick, and sometimes it’s like watching a tank. How is an opponent supposed to stop both a magic trick <i>and </i>a tank? That was the dilemma for the Cowboys with a little over five minutes left in the third quarter, when Purdy whirled out on that naked bootleg and Kittle took off down the middle, waving his white-gloved hand.

Purdy saw it — he had kept his eyes upfield, and he let a vector go straight to his free-running tight end.

Kittle reached out that gloved hand and tipped the ball. On a dead run, he juggled it like a sleight-of-hand performer. It ticked it off his helmet once, twice and danced back up in the air. Kittle got the tips of both gloved hands on the thing, pulled it into his middle and shoulder-rolled to the turf, an oh-my-God catch of 30 yards.

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“It seemed like it was 10 seconds of bobbling,” Purdy said later, calmly reflecting on the play in a demure white T-shirt. “I was like, ‘Come on, dude.’ ”

And suddenly the Cowboys couldn’t hold off the 49ers anymore — at least not without holding them illegally. “You could feel it in the whole stadium — that, man, that felt good,” Purdy said.

Kittle’s catch was the key play in the 49ers’ only touchdown drive of the night, a virtuoso campaign of equal parts brawn and finesse. By the time McCaffrey barreled into the end zone on his two-yard thrust with 14:58 left in the final period, the drive had consumed 91 yards. “Got our offense going a little bit. Got our swagger going a bit,” Kittle said.

From then on, it was like watching a strangler tighten his grip. The Cowboys were reduced to steadily more desperate and pointless writhing. Brett Maher’s 43-yard field goal with 11:03 left cut the 49ers’ lead to 16-12. But that was still a four-point margin because, see, Maher had missed an extra point in the second quarter. Yes, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2023/01/19/cowboys-kicker-brett-maher/" target=_blank>another one</a> — his fifth miss of the postseason, this one blocked. The 49ers took over again and wouldn’t give the ball up until 3:04 remained — “chewing the clock,” Purdy said, holding on for nearly eight minutes before settling for Gould’s 28-yard field goal.

The final margin looked small, but the play that finally separated the 49ers was an unforgettable giant.

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Sally Jenkins is a sports columnist and feature writer for The Washington Post. She began her second stint at The Washington Post in 2000 after spending the previous decade working as a book author and as a magazine writer.